Londoners Diary: Marbles aren’t even Elgin’s, protests Vicky Pryce

Is Vicky Pryce losing her marbles — or is it time we lost ours? The Greek economist has sided with the likes of Amal Clooney by arguing in Prospect magazine that we’re embarrassing ourselves by not returning the Elgin marbles to the Parthenon in Athens. “What belongs together should be together,” writes Pryce. “Imagine if English people had to see St Paul’s without its dome or only half of Stonehenge. The marbles don’t make sense out of their natural setting.

“For more than 2,000 years,” she continues, “the Parthenon and its marbles withstood the weather, invasions and wars, and stood as a symbol of what we now know as Euro-Atlantic civilisation. Then an Englishman extracted them and buried them in a building in London.”

She points out it was the 19th-century British ambassador Lord Elgin who bribed Ottoman officials into letting him cart off the Greeks’ national treasures, “not the sort of behaviour usually deemed worthy of a British ambassador”. Who better to critique the failings of a state official than the former wife of ex-Lib-Dem MP Chris Huhne?

Pryce — who deftly turned her nine-week stay in HM Prison Holloway into Prisonomics, an examination of the human and financial cost of sending people to jail — also argues that even referring to the carvings as the “Elgin” marbles is an offensive misnomer. Quoting the late Melina Mercouri, former Greek minister of culture, she points out that “there are no such things as the Elgin marbles. There is a Michelangelo David. There is a Da Vinci Last Supper. There are no Elgin marbles!” If only there weren’t — there’d be so much less to squabble over.

Osborne brings in extra tax income with a bottle or two

Is boozing back? Last month Boris Johnson explained that he can “drink an awful lot at lunch” without it affecting his afternoon output, and earlier this year rumours flew that EU President Jean-Claude Juncker was a connoisseur of cognac.

Now it appears George Osborne can handle a glass or two. This weekend the Chancellor was interviewed in The Times Magazine by Janice Turner. The pair met by chance two days ahead of their scheduled meeting after being invited to the same dinner party, at which Osborne “arrives alone with two bottles of good wine”.

Turner noted “he drinks a great deal of wine but nonetheless can summon precise statistics and arcane factoids”. When they meet for the interview and a meal he “quickly orders white wine for the table, then visibly unwinds”, then gets steak and chips “and moves on to red wine”. A bacchanalian champion, or Turner’s attempt to turn readers on to the Times Wine Club?

In awe over Paxo’s brief encounter

Jeremy Paxman, not a known fan of tech, delivered a speech at Microsoft’s Future Decoded conference at Excel yesterday. One tweeter said she was “shrinking in [her] seat as Paxman expressed his rather cutting view of [the marketing of] L’Oréal”. He lambasted the brand’s “You’re worth it” slogan, declaring: “This is the age of the narcissist. It’s a time when anyone’s opinion is worth as much as an expert.” He illustrated the talk with pictures of David Gandy on a screen behind him. Paxo has had opinions on M&S men’s undies lacking “support”.

As one man said of the Gandy torso: “It’s something I never expected to see hovering over Paxman’s head.”

N-ice and easy does it

We took to the ice last night as Fortnum & Mason and Somerset House launched this year’s skating rink. Model Olivia Inge and hip hop icon Neneh Cherry were among those kicking off the festive season with mulled cider, while David Linley showed off his manoeuvres.

Festive spirit: Olivia Inge (Picture: Dave Benett)

For TV veteran Bruce Forsyth, however, it’s too chilly for his liking. “I go straight to the Caribbean at Christmas,” he said. “I play golf, I read, I eat well.

I still have the turkey and trimmings, the decorations are up, we just happen to be on the beach. So nobody will get a better Christmas than me.” Bah humbug.

Saluting the dead in style

Anthems for doomed youth and heartbreaking critiques of dulce et decorum est filled the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in Moorgate last night, as Damian Lewis, Freddie Fox and Dominic West and fellow alumni brought to life verses from the First World War for the Josephine Hart Poetry Hour. West, soon to appear in the First World War drama Testament of Youth, confided to The Londoner that there was a plan to slip off to the Tower of London later to pay their respects. Poetry and poppies — how better to salute the dead?

Look Down Under for the Labour axe

Though some politicos say it’s too close to a general election to oust a leader, The Londoner thinks not.

Recall that in Australia a new head of Labour led his party to a landslide victory after just a month in the hot seat. The opportunist was Bob Hawke. In December 1982 the already unpopular Labour leader Bill Hayden lost a crucial by-election — think Ed Miliband sweating after the Rochester and Strood result. The following February Hayden was pressured to resign.

Hawke, who’d had his eye on the position, was immediately spirited into the leadership. He might have expected to be granted some time to settle in, yet in just hours the Liberal PM Malcolm Fraser, unaware of that day’s musical chairs, called a snap election, aiming to stop Hawke replacing Hayden. But Fraser was too late, and within five weeks of becoming leader of the party Hawke was PM. He won by a landslide and ended up serving for 10 years. Potential Brutus wannabes, take note.

Now Ebola is in Gates’s sights

While Microsoft was decoding the future down in Docklands, on the other side of town its founder and former chairman Bill Gates was making an impassioned speech on the need to learn crucial lessons from the Ebola outbreak.

“We have a significant chance to halt this epidemic,” Gates told MPs and peers in the Queen’s Robing Room in the Palace of Westminster. “We have a chance to go back into these countries and build effective primary healthcare systems so that future outbreaks will be detected sooner and stopped at an early stage. It is very likely in the next 20 years something will come along that is even more transmissive than Ebola.”

Thank goodness we have the man who built the first user-friendly operating system tackling the problem head-on.